1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of digital systems employing non-volatile (or flash) memory and particularly to wear-leveling memory cells of the flash memory.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Solid state memory or non-volatile memory, in the form of flash, is readily employed in numerous applications requiring saving and retrieving digital information. Some use thereof includes memory sticks, disk drives, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other digital mobile devices.
NAND flash memory is a type of flash memory constructed from electrically-erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) cells, which are an array of floating gate transistors. NAND refers to the type of gate used in the flash memory. NAND flash memory uses tunnel injection for write and tunnel release during erase operations. NAND flash, which is a type of non-volatile memory, is ideal for storage of digital information in portable devices.
However, NAND flash memory does have limitations. Namely, in flash, digital information or data is stored as binary information, i.e. ‘1’ or ‘0’. One limitation posed by NAND flash memory is that during storage of data, which occurs during writing to or programming of the flash memory, data that is ‘1’s can only be stored in the flash memory. Data that is ‘0’s cannot be store until erase occurs of the previously-stored data. In fact, when writing from a state of ‘0’ to a state of ‘1’, the flash memory needs to be erased a “block” at a time, which is undesirable as it adversely affects performance by way of efficiency. The reason for the requirement for erasing a “block” at a time is that while the smallest unit for a read or program operation to NAND flash memory is a byte (eight bits) or a word, the smallest unit for erase is a block. A bit of information or data is represented by a ‘1’ or ‘0’. A block refers to one or more pages of information made of bytes or words and the block is an erasable unit. An exemplary page size is 2,112 bytes, 2024 bytes of which are typically reserved for data and 64 bytes of which are typically reserved for spare. Spare being overhead information, such as address flag, error correction code (ECC) or other non-data information. The structure of a page can be either 4*512+4*16 bytes or 4*(512+16) bytes, the 512 bytes being used for data and the 16 bytes for spare. The structure of a page may be other than the foregoing but essentially similar in the type of information included therein.
Single Level Cell (SLC) flash memory and Multi Level Cell (MLC) flash memory are two types of NAND flash memory. The erase block size of SLC flash is 128K+4K bytes and the erase block size of MLC flash is 256K+8K bytes. Thus, erase operations severely impact performance, particularly, when performed on large capacity memory. Another limitation of NAND flash memory is having a finite numbers of times of erase cycles before it becomes unreliable. The number of erase operations that may be performed on NAND flash memory reliably is known to be limited to 10,000 to 1,000,000.
FIG. 1 shows a diagram of the manner in which a block is re-written using current wear leveling techniques. During a write operation in which a block of information is previous written thereto and is now being re-written, which occurs readily when a host re-writes a file, the block 10, which is shown to include 128 pages with each page being 2024 bytes of data and 64 bytes of overhead or spare, is essentially moved to a different block, or a new block 14. Re-written information, which is shown to be included in the buffer memory controller 12 is written into a corresponding location of the new block 16 and the remaining information that is not being re-written of the block 10 is then moved to the block 16. The old block 18, which is essentially the block 10 is then erased. The problem with this technique is that each time there is a re-writing of a block, an erase operation needs to be performed thereby adversely affecting the life span of the memory cells within the flash memory.
Additionally, the life time of the MLC flash memory is limited to 10,000 erase cycles or operations. An entire block must be erased in MLC flash memory before a page can be re-programmed. Therefore, wear leveling techniques are needed to address the MLC flash re-programming problem.
Wear leveling is a technique used to distribute use of the memory cells within the MLC and/or SLC or any other type of non-volatile (or flash) memory evenly thereby extending the lifetime of the latter. In performing wear leveling, a memory controller is used to re-map logical addresses, used by a host to identify addresses into which information is to be written or read from, to different physical addresses, used by the memory controller to address the flash memory to store or read information from the host, so that write operations are evenly distributed among the memory cells thereby extending the endurance of the flash memory.
In light of the foregoing, there is a need for flash memory to have increased reliability.